Connecticut Society 

of the Sons of tne 

American Revolution 




Address by 

HON. GEORGE B. CHANDLER 

AT 

Annual Banquet 
OF THE CONNECTICUT SOCIETY 

AT 
Hartford, Connecticut, February 22, 1917 



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WHAT WOULD WASHINGTON HAVE US DO? 



At no time in the life of the nation has it been more impera- 
tive that the Sons of the American Revolution gather on the 
birthday of the Father of His Country to ask themselves solemnly 
what he would have them do if he were now living. To be in- 
vited to address you at this grave moment is an honor and re- 
sponsibility that I do not underrate. 

My problem upon this occasion is as much to know what 
to leave unsaid as to know what to say. America is a Republic 
and its stability rests upon the principle of majority rule. The 
people have spoken at a recent national election and no candid 
man can deny that the policy of our government up to the date 
of that utterance has been approved. It is my belief that a 
referendum to the people would yield a hke endorsement of the 
course of the administration up to the present moment. To 
what extent, under such ciicumstances and in such an hour, is 
private disagreement with what appears to be the poUcy of the 
government and the will of the people consistent with loyalty 
and good citizenship? That there is a limit beyond which such 
opposition can not with safety or decency go at such a juncture, 
no person schooled in the principles of free government can deny ; 
and, while giving voice to some of the emotions that now possess 
me — and which I beheve possess this ancient and patriotic 
Society — I shall endeavor not to transgress that limit. 

I assume that I may recite historical facts, ancient or recent, 
without offense. He is a superficial and biased student of events 
who wiU not admit that no great nation, with the possible excep- 
tion of China, in modern history — or so far as I know, in ancient 
history — ever has submitted peacefully to a series of outrages 
and affronts such as have been perpetrated against the United 
States of America during the past two years. The question 
which we should ask today of the spirit of George Washington 
is — Has such peaceful acquiescence been justifiable? Has the 
national character been enriched or impoverished by this poHcy? 
And to what extent can we continue to submit to diplomatic 
insult and murder upon the high seas without taking up arms? 

During this unfortunate period there have been two classes 
of offenses to be weighed — first, those against the recognized 
laws of nations and the unwritten rules of hospitafity. These 
I call offenses against the common morahty. And, second, those 



against the laws of God, recognized in greater or less degree among 
all civilized peoples. These, I will term offenses against the 
higher morality. 

First, as to the former class. This war started with a viola- 
tion of the express terms of a convention to which both Germany 
and the United States were signatory parties. The invasion 
of Belgium contravened in the most audacious manner the terms 
of Articles 1, 2 and 5 of the Second Hague Conference, and it 
was our right under that instrument — and, as I believe, our 
duty, — to protest against that wanton and illegal act. 

Thereupon there was immediately inaugurated within our 
borders, under the leadership and probably with the financial 
backing of eminent citizens of a foreign power who were enjoying 
the hospitality of this country, a propaganda for the influencing 
of public sentiment, which continued with increasing virulence 
in proportion as it declined in effectiveness, until it finally came 
to be aimed at our government itself and its responsible head. 
This propaganda sought not only to control nominations for 
high office but to determine elections after nominations had been 
made. Along with this were conducted fomentings of domestic 
discord, the instigation of strikes in munition plants, the dyna- 
miting of factories, the destruction of bridges, and conspiracies 
against transportation and production. German consuls and 
attaches have been convicted of complicity in these outrages in 
American courts. An Austrian ambassador has been dismissed 
for diplomatic discourtesy, correspondence has been uncovered 
insulting the President of the United States, more of a graver 
nature probably uncovered and wisely suppressed, and a German 
Ambassador permitted and apparently forgiven the exquisite 
insolence of pubUshing in the American press an advertisement 
warning the people of a free and sovereign state that on a certain 
specific occasion his Government contemplated an act of whole- 
sale homicide of its citizens on the high seas — a program that 
was carried out to the letter when the Lusitania received her 
fatal stab and her human cargo found its grave in the Irish sea. 

In the meantime there has continued the wearying monotony 
of sinkings of American ships and murders of American citizens 
against which we have solemnly protested with the warning 
that no "word or act" would be omitted in the maintenance of 
our legal rights. At the same time there have been probable 
violations of property rights by the Entente Alhes — irritating 
but involving no loss of Ufe and clearly of a justifiable character. 
When these outrages culminated in the Sussex note, an agree- 
ment was solemnly entered into with Germany which, as we infer 
from convincing evidence, the government of that nation proba- 
bly had no intention of keeping beyond the time when her sub- 
marine fleet could be made ready for the final onslaught. This pact 



has been summarily abrogated and a caieer of anarchy upon the 
high seas entered upon, on a scale hitherto unheard of and of a 
character such as the world has not witnessed since this republic 
in its gallant youth raised its arm against the Barbary pirates. 
After due deUberation diplomatic relations with Germany were 
severed and the enterprising advertiser of homicide in the first 
degree was finally given his passports. 

In the meantime there has been kept up by the Prussian 
autocracy, with a fatuous insolence hard to explain, a series of 
annoyances to our ambassador, our consuls and our citizens in 
Germany, the legal status of which I will not presume to discuss. 
The situation today is that for the first time in American his- 
tory — except possibly under the Embargo of unblessed memory 
— outgoing freight is piled high upon our docks and any ship 
bearing the flag of our country that ventures upon the immemorial 
highway of the nations does so at its own risk. A more intolerable 
or humiliating situation it would be hard to conceive. 

Such has been the course of those events whose sanctions 
and penalties fall within the scope of international law and com- 
mon practice. Coming now to the offenses against the higher 
raorahty — and it is upon the higher morahty alone that our 
supineness can be explained or justified — what have we beheld? 
A people, distinguished in scholarship, industry, music and the 
higher arts, have been trained mentally and physically for four 
decades in the philosophy of military aggression, forged into a 
weapon infinitely the most powerful ever devised by the wit of 
man, and finally hurled at the appointed moment against the 
peace of the world and the rights of its neighbors. That this 
people has not been without its grievances in the past, and that 
the nations opposed to them have not been at all times guiltless 
of offense, no candid man can deny; but no historical fact can 
be more clearly established than that this colossal adventure 
has been long premeditated by the Prussian ohgarchy and that 
the entire Germanic mind has been assiduously prepared for it. 
The literature of the country has been suffused with evidences 
of this purpose, and the astounding feature of the situation, as 
we look back, has been the credufity and indifference of neighboring 
peoples in the presence of patent facts. Probably they, too, had 
their pacifists who averred that it never would happen. 

When the opportune occasion arose, we beheld Servia, bullied 
and brow-beaten by a series of conditions purposely made so 
intolerable that no nation could accept them and preserve its 
autonomy and self-respect, and subsequently ground remorse- 
lessly under the heel of the invader, its people reduced to starva- 
tion and its aged monarch made a pitiable petitioner at the courts 
of Europe. 



In the Belgian invasion we have beheld, in addition to the 
violation of the terms of the Hague Convention, a violation of 
the treaty of 1831 and of the immemorial and unwritten law of 
nations. Not only has an organized state been ruthlessly over- 
run, but in the process fair cities have been leveled and venerable 
temples of learning and art demolished. We have beheld the 
invaded territory extortionately taxed for the privilege of being 
invaded, and as a crowning infamy the deportation of its citizens 
by tens of thousands into state slavery in an adjoining nation. 

We have beheld France, our earliest friend, who succored 
this nation in its helpless infancy, treacherously stabbed in the 
back because, credulously trusting in the plighted word of her 
great enemy, she had restricted her fortifications and mobilization 
to her own eastern frontier. 

We have beheld Greece, bound by all the historical ties of 
gratitude to France and England, and pledged by a signed and 
sealed compact to join arms with Servia whenever she should be 
attacked by Bulgaria, violating her pUghted word and secretly 
giving aid to the Teutons — by submarine bases, for example — 
all on account of a royal marriage. The Greek Constitution has 
been trampled under foot by this medieval monarch and the hands 
of the clock have been turned back 200 years. In the midst of 
modern democracy the specter of the Divine Right of Kings again 
raises its head. 

We have beheld the assassination and extermination — I 
am using the terms almost with literal exactness — of the oldest 
Christian people. History, I beheve, affords no parallel in fiendish 
inhumanity and calculated cruelty to the Armenian massacres. 
The American savages, glutted with blood and intoxicated with 
the fever of battle, were not more inhuman than the studied and 
deliberate policy of the Turks. This poUcy could have been con- 
trolled and checked by the Prussian autocracy by a nod of the 
head or a wave of the hand. No historical fact is more clearly 
established than this. 

We have beheld an attempt — futile, but none the less crim- 
inal and sacrilegious, — to stir up a religious war, an attempt to 
array the forces of Mohammedanism against those of Christianity. 
It is an affront to the memory of every Christian soldier who 
died in the wars of the Crusades, or who feU at the battle of Tours 
when Charles Martel rolled back from Europe the tide of Islam. 

We have beheld the brazen adoption of the policy of Fright- 
fulness — the waging of war so cruelly and remorselessly by the 
bombardment of summer resorts, the dropping of bombs upon 
the women and children of unfortified towns, the torpedoing of 
passenger boats, and the application of the iron heel to invaded 
territory as to endeavor to strike terror to the heart of neutrals 



and to the civil population of belligerents. Nowhere has the 
subtle psychology of this policy been more potent than in America. 
While it has inflamed a certain element with a holy wrath, it has 
furnished a text for the pacifist to dilate upon the horrors of war 
and extol the virtues of non-resistance. Indeed the unconscious 
alliance of pacifist with Teuton has been one of the outstanding 
ironies of this world tragedy. 

Such have been those oifenses against the higher morality 
which, in their relation to the United States, it is difficult to 
subsume under the canons of international law. And through 
it all we have been "neutral!" Americans have prated grand- 
iosely about "humanity" and adjured the "liberals" of aU lands 
to take heart! The President has asked us to be neutral "even 
in thought!" I am loyal to my President; he has been elected 
by a majority of my countrymen; my service is his and my acts 
must be his. But my conscience is my own! He cannot become 
the custodian of my convictions. It is no time for an incon- 
spicuous private citizen to add his pennyweight of criticism to 
the burden of our ruler, but when he says in an address before 
the League to Enforce Peace, "With the causes and objects of 
the war we are not concerned. The obscure fountains from 
which its stupendous flood has burst forth we are not interested 
to search for or explore." I reserve the right to indulge in a 
private moral revolt. Those were burning words that Agnes 
Repplier recently uttered in the Atlantic Monthly. In comment- 
ing upon this statement, she says: "The greatest, or at least 
the most far-reaching, moral issue which has arisen in nineteen 
hundred years is offered to the judgment of the world, and we 
are bidden to ignore it. The rights and wrongs of uncounted 
millions are at stake, agonies unutterable have dimmed the light 
of heaven, the whole fabric of civilization rocks in the blast, 
and our President assures us we are not even interested in know- 
ing where the guilt lies, that it is not our province to sever truth 
from falsehood! For the first time in our lives we have been 
offered release from the responsibilities inseparable to man's 
estate." 

The problem for the Sons of the American Revolution to 
ponder is whether this country has reached such an exalted moral 
plane that its policy of inaction is a sublime exhibition of Christian 
forbccirance ; or whether its supine submission to the tide of 
events is evidence of a decline of the national spirit and an emas- 
culation of the national character. If the latter should turn out 
to be true, it is worth while for us to endeavor to ascertain its 
causes. 

In my opinion one of its causes is to be found in the moral 
collapse of our clergy in the face of a great crisis. I have been 



amazed and shocked — or possibly encouraged — to find in 
hard-headed, square-jawed men of affairs and in virile, red- 
blooded young college graduates a more searching grasp of the 
moral and political issues at stake in this war than has been gen- 
erally revealed by our spiritual advisers. Occasionally there 
has rung out from our pulpits the voice of a prophet, but in general 
there has been a tendency to dwell hngeringly upon the horrors 
of war and glorify peace into a beatitude, to the exclusion of 
truth, justice, righteousness and honor. The inexorable laws of 
struggle and sacrifice which are fundamental in the development 
of personal or national character have been glided over raeagerly. 
Our clergy have talked about a "league of the nations," the 
"community" of the races, and the glories of internationalism 
and world citizenship ; but what is a community? It is a common 
sharing of common responsibiUty. If I sit upon my porch while 
a buUy beats and robs an inoffensive little boy, or a brute vio- 
lates the honor of a woman, and callously look on and do nothing 
because I am a man of peace and it is none of my business, what 
kind of a citizen of my boasted community am I.^^ Neutral, I 
suppose! And I can expiate it all the next day by taking up a 
collection to send some fruit and flowers to the wronged family 
or by preaching a sermon, full of beautiful generalizations about 
love and humanity. 

Our Protestant pastors aie given to lamenting the fact that 
they are unable to reach the young men of the land. They com- 
plain of the disproportion of women in their congregations and 
in the activities of their church organizations. When we have a 
religion preached to us that is vibrant with a call to present duty, 
instead of nebulous in its promise of security from attack, our 
young men wiU respond with the thrill of eager youth. How, 
for example, can a pastor expect to appeal to a young lawyer, 
schooled in the processes of logic, when he exalts peace into a 
moral quality? His hearer knows that, if he were to prepare a 
brief in which his reasoning limped so palpably, it is doubtful 
if the Court would do it the honor of reading it through. Peace 
is not a moral quality. It is a mere state or condition. True, it 
is a condition very much to be desired, just as prosperity and 
good homes and warm clothing are to be desired. But if these 
things are purchased at the price of dishonor, they become a badge 
of shame. Justice is a moral quaUty, so is truth, so is honor, and 
righteousness is the sum of all the moral quahties. It is true 
that Christ preached peace, but He did not preach peace at any 
price. If He had, there would have been no Gethsemane and no 
Calvary. 

I wish the cartoon of the Dutch artist, Raemaeker, could be 
framed and placed on the study table of every pacifist pastor in 
this country — the figure of the body of a maiden clinging to a 

8 



cross with a dagger through her heart. Beside her stand three 
sensual male figures. One of them points his finger at her and 
sneeringly asks: "And why did she not yield: they would have 
paid, to be sure.^" The maiden is labelled "Belgia." Yes, Bel- 
gium could have had "peace" and the price beside — for per- 
mitting the Central Powers to march across her territory and 
stab France in the back. But she went on the altar for such a 
bauble as honor! Alongside it, it might be well to place that 
other cartoon — was it another of Baemaeker's, or was it from 
Punch .^ — in which Kaiser Wilhelm stands pointing to a devastated 
Belgium and asks of its indomitable young monarch "What have 
you left, Albert?" "My soul!" is the reply. 

Another cause of the failure of the nation to measure up to 
the moral responsibilities of the hour is found in^ the occupation 
of this country by numerous partially assimilated racial groups. 
When the Democratic Chairman of the Committee on Foreign 
Relations in the Senate and the Republican Leader of the lower 
House, each representing large German constituencies, advocate 
the contemptible poUcy of warning American citizens of ships 
where they have a legal right to be, for fear this nation may be 
called upon to defend them, the condition of our American Con- 
gress is indeed reduced to a low estate. With brothers, sons, or 
other relatives fighting in the German Army, or lying in unmarked 
graves in front of Verdun or the Somme, it is quite understand- 
able that men of German blood should turn yearningly to the cause 
of the Fatherland, but what shall we say of pubUc men who 
forget their oath of office and the honor of their country at such 
an hour? We have also in this country an unknown percentage 
of citizens of Irish blood who nurse so keenly the past wrongs of 
their people at the hands of England that they are blinded to the 
principles of human liberty at stake in this contest. Just how 
considerable is this percentage, I am unable to say. Most of the 
Irish-Americans with whom I converse condemn the acts and 
poUcy of the Central Powers. We have also a considerable number 
of Swedish-Americans who, on account of their inherited enmity 
to Russia, seem to have been likewise blinded. I also believe 
that a certain percentage of our Russian Jews have allowed their 
sense of the wrongs of their kindred at the hands of Russia to 
dull their vision of the issues of right and wrong involved in this 
contest. In other words, the American spirit has failed to re- 
spond because of the lack of homogeneity in the American people. 

Still another cause may be found in the geographical remote- 
ness of large sections of this country from the theater of action. 
It has been difficult to interest people of the Middle West and 
the Mountain States in questions of national honor involved in 
the rights of the sea. These people are intensely loyal and would 
respond to a man, if the call to arms were sounded; but it is 



perhaps not unnatural that we should find greater indifference 
there than upon the Atlantic seaboard. There is also a larger 
German-American element in the West than here. 

The chief cause, however, is to be found in a philosophy in- 
sidiously taking root in the minds of the people that the State 
is an institution to be filched from and leaned upon, but not to 
be served. Every street corner orator declaims raucously about 
his rights, but never a word about his duties. Until we learn in 
the fire of bitter experience that rights and duties are correlative 
terms, we can look for no revival of the national spirit. So long 
as able-bodied young men are left to lounge about city streets 
and country grocery stores, while other young men volunteer 
to go to the front and fight their battles for them, democracy is 
a mere sounding phrase. Until we recognize that the state pro- 
tects our property, safeguards our fives, gives us our education 
and renders possible the performance of individual and family 
functions under the rule of law and order; that the condition 
of orderly liberty is the fruit of long ages of struggle in which 
uncounted and unnamed millions have borne their part; and that 
he who would participate in these benefits without contributing 
to them is a parasite and a robber, we can have no real sense of 
personal loyalty to the nation. Instead of gratitude for the bless- 
ings of fiberty and order, we often encounter resentment against 
their necessary restraints. Only the shock of disaster, or the 
immediate and thoroughgoing estabUshment of a system of uni- 
versal and compulsory military service can renew the declining 
national character. This would symbofize patriotism in action, 
not mere lip-loyalty. If we are to rely on volunteer military 
service, why not introduce voluntary tax-paying? Let that in 
turn be foUowed by voluntary observance of law. Abrogate 
government, relax discipline, and let every duty, public and 
private, be subject to voluntary observance. Then, indeed, 
will our dreamers have their "rights" and we shall enter upon a 
Fool's Paradise. 

Can we not copy the virtues of other nations without appro- 
priating their vices? Switzerland, more democratic than America, 
has done it. Let us take our boys in the schools, begin young 
with them, train them to physical vigor and powers of endurance, 
teach them to stand erect and give and obey orders, instill into 
them love of country and concrete patriotism, and at the age of 
eighteen or nineteen turn them over to the federal government 
to be moulded and made fit by a period of military service, and 
we will have a generation of better workmen, better lawyers, 
better doctors, better ministers, better husbands and fathers, 
and infinitely better citizens. Do likewise with our girls; make 
them, also, fit and strong; educate them in aU that is truest and 
best! Let their education, if possible, be so much better than 

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that of boys as the functions they are to perform are more sacred 
and important. Before all, teach them in the fear of God that 
there has been confided to them the holy office of replenishing 
the earth. When instruction in "birth control" succeeds the 
sacrament of the family altar, and the whimpering refrain, "I 
Didn't Raise My Boy to be a Soldier," replaces the martial notes 
of the "Star-Spangled Banner," the doom of this republic is 
sealed ! 

In addition to, and sensitively expressive of, the foregoing 
causes of national apathy, there is, I beheve, another that I may 
not at this time discuss, but which history will weigh justly and 
judge unsparingly. Be the causes what they may, — be they 
racial, refigious, geographical, philosophical or poUtical, — that 
nation which is the home of freedom and birthplace of democracy 
has looked on with callous indifference at an hour when these 
institutions throughout the world have been hanging in the 
balance; it has chosen the pathway of sloth and ease instead of 
hard duty ; it has preferred to grow rich and fat in material things 
at the expense of poverty of spirit and leanness of the soul. In 
the brief space of a decade and a half we have changed from a 
nation that the world applauded for taking up the White Man's 
Burden, for freeing Cuba, regenerating the Philippine archipelago, 
maintaining the open door in China and assuming the obliga- 
tions and honors of a World Power, to a nation of apologists, 
word-worshippers, phrase-mongers and murmurers of porch 
philosophies. If this current be not stayed, inside of the next 
half-dozen generations some more virile people will conquer the 
soil that your forefathers wrested from the tyranny of a British 
king, and those who now occupy it will become parasites and 
vassals. I do not expect this to happen. I have faith in the 
mighty latent forces not as yet called upon and which are chafing 
under restraint; but in addressing this society of iron traditions, 
one must not mince words or gloss over realities. While pleading 
for national manhood, one must not play the moral coward in 
the process. 

We end where we began — What would Washington have us 
do? Washington the unselfish, the tenacious, the wise in counsel, 
the decisive in action; Washington the man of practical vision 
and universal conscience, who saw in the wrongs of Massachu- 
setts the cause of hberty in Virginia, and who recognized in a 
paltry tax on tea levied in a far-off colony an invasion of the im- 
memorial rights of Englishmen everywhere; who scorned eva- 
sions and excuses and dared to pit a disorganized group of un- 
ready and widely-scattered colonies against one of the first powers 
of Europe; who asked not, "Csui we win.^" but only, "Are we 
right!" 



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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



You await my answer? — if it has not al q 020 914 028 
it were futile to measure words. Your forefauiers answereu Ji 
in 1776. They answered it when they stood at Bunker Hill, 
chaiged at Saratoga, endured at Valley Forge and triumphed 
at Yorktown. They answered it when, at the end of the war, 
bare-footed and in Uttle straggUng groups, with no sound of 
martial music or acclaim of welcoming throngs to greet them, 
they found their way back from distant battlefields to their 
neglected farms and impoverished families, — a race of heroes! 
And because that question, asked as it was by the searching 
logic of events, was answered by them in the way it was, you and 
I and every alien who has since come to our shores and received 
the boon of our citizenship have today a nation to live in and 
traditions to defend. 

The nations of Europe are not on trial today. They have 
met their Gethsemane and overcome it. France, our traditional 
friend, gallant, chivalrous, heroic France — she is not on trial! 
England, our traditional enemy, yet the Motherland, the home 
of our institutions and om- literature — dogged, steadfast, un- 
shakable and calmy brave — she is not on trial. Neither is Russia, 
awakened out of her slumber to a new life, on trial. Nor, God 
forbid, is Belgium on trial, — martyred Belgium, the hero of the 
nations, a people who were tempted but whose honor was not 
for sale. She surely has met the test and judgment has been 
passed. Nor, gentlemen, are the German people on trial! For 
the world has never witnessed a steadfastness, soUdarity, loyalty, 
efficiency, and sacrifice greater than this wonderful people has 
exemplified; and after they awake from this horrible nightmare 
and their historians have placed the blame of their calamity where 
it belongs, — as we hope — upon a deposed and departed dynasty, 
her people in the light of a new liberty will read poems and sing 
songs reciting the mighty deeds of valor of her Great Army. 
They fought for the right as they saw the right; more than this 
no man can bestow or people vouchsafe. The one nation of all 
the world whose moral qualities aie being weighed in the balance 
in this mighty crisis is our gisuit young Republic of the West. 
History will judge us; our sons will judge us; the world is judg- 
ing us. God strengthen Columbia's arm and refurnish her heart! 



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020 914 028 7 



